


Stella Maris

by Philosophizes



Category: Hetalia: Axis Powers
Genre: Art, Fluff, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-07
Updated: 2014-07-07
Packaged: 2018-02-07 19:18:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,274
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1910667
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Philosophizes/pseuds/Philosophizes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ludwig had asked for an art lesson, and Feliciano obliges one cloudy day in the Dolomites.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Stella Maris

**Author's Note:**

  * For [budgeridoo](https://archiveofourown.org/users/budgeridoo/gifts).



“It looks like rain,” Ludwig said when Feliciano started unpacking his art case.

“So?” Feliciano answered- and, Ludwig had to admit, looking out on the Dolomites from beside the dinner basket they’d packed, that there _was_ some impressive lighting going on. “I want to capture it and anyway, I said I’d show you how.”

If it rained, well… then it rained.

“You did,” he agreed, and let himself fall backwards.

“Ludwig-!”

Ludwig tilted his head back and smiled at the Feliciano, who, for a moment, was still alarmed by what looked like the beginnings of a collapse.

“I have to see you working somehow,” he told him; and, oh, if he turned his head _just_ like that, he could hear Feliciano breathing.

Feliciano just looked at him a moment, surprised at finding Ludwig half-lying, half-sitting in his lap; and then smiled brightly.

“I guess you do!” he said, and drew his knees up so he could rest the pastel paper pad on them, the bottom of it sitting on Ludwig’s chest. “Oh- this is going to be hard with you breathing. The paper’s going to keep moving.”

“Mm,” Ludwig replied, lightly stroking the inside of Feliciano’s knee so it jerked.

“Ludwig! No.”

The other man’s hands settled on the backs of Feliciano’s thighs.

“Do you want me to stop breathing?” he asked.

“ _No,_ silly,” Feliciano told him. “Now watch and stop distracting me.”

He picked up a soft-leaded pencil.

“Okay, first, see how the sunlight is all orangey on the mountains; and there’s that reddish-orange clay dirt around the rock closest to us?”

“Well, I _could_ , Feliciano, but the paper is in the way now.”

Feliciano lifted the pad again so Ludwig could see the landscape and started flipping pages of it.

“That’s the color I really want the picture to focus on, and I want to keep the kind of glowy thing going on with the mountains, so I use the light tannish-orangey paper instead of one of the other colors. If I wanted to show the lighting contrast instead of the lighting color I’d use the cream since I could shade really well through monotones on that; and if I wanted to contrast the mountains and the grass I’d use one of the grays or blues or greens.”

He put the pad back in place.

“And you see how the pastel paper is rough? That’s called the tooth, and that’s what you want in paper if you’re doing something crumbly like pastels or charcoal or graphite, because it traps the itty bitty little bits your medium breaks up into. I’m gonna use all of them, so.”

“Why not do the lighting contrast?” Ludwig asked.

Feliciano shrugged, and Ludwig could feel it through his chest.

“I’m going to _do_ it, but that’s not what I want the _point_ to be. Okay, so, you do your outlining in a softer pencil because it erases easier, and when I get to blending with the charcoal and the pastels it’ll disappear.”

His hand started moving, arms settling comfortably over Ludwig’s shoulders, one elbow digging into his ribs slightly as the lines of the landscape were quickly swiped across the paper.

“You want to draw with your whole arm and not your wrist, unless you’re doing detail work. When you’re doing your outlines they don’t _have_ to be detailed, but really it’s up to you. I like just getting the motion in the lines, and then letting the colors show where everything else is ‘cause it’s fun to just-!”

Feliciano swooped the long ridge curve between the mountain outcropping closest to them and the group further in the distance.

Ludwig could- _kind_ of see the landscape in those lines. It didn’t really look much like the view.

“It doesn’t matter if the outlines are kind of off if you know what you’re doing,” Feliciano continued. “Art is a process and part of the process is that eventually you change just about everything you put on the paper. Now when you do color, usually you want to start off with the lightest stuff because it’s _always_ harder to make something lighter than it is to make something darker, buuuut…”

He slotted the pencil back into the art case and took the top off his pastel box, taking out the gray, the black, and a dark green. With a light touch, he started blocking out shadows on the mountain outcroppings in the dark green.

“The lighting is pretty hard here, so there’s not too much shading to do except where the light hits; and I want to let the paper color speak for me there as much as possible.”

As Ludwig watched, the mountains started to take shape on the sheet in front of him, shadows coming in first green, then gray-with-black, charcoal added over top when the chalk muddied just a little too much. The clouds were all charcoal, gray and black and looming, spots of pink-tinged-white pastel for the breaks in cover; the ground gray and five darkly deep shades of green for the grass, dirt the red-orange of the paper with just a hint of added brown and gray peeking through the ground cover but for where the grass turned patchy and sparse on the dry scree slides.

“It’s getting dark,” Ludwig said after a time. Feliciano had slipped forward, leaning over him unconsciously to get closer to the paper, squinting. “Feli, you’ve got it- time to stop.”

He reached up through the evening air to touch the side of his face, and Feliciano made a little _umhhhgh_ noise and pressed into the touch, closing his eyes.

“Okay, okay,” he mumbled. “Hand me the fixative.”

“The what?”

“The thing that looks like a hairspray can. If I don’t use that the picture will get all smeary.”

Ludwig fumbled around until he grabbed it and handed it over. Feliciano prodded him up and out of his lap so he wouldn’t get the aerosol into the other man’s eyes. A long spray, waved back and forth over the paper, then a few minutes of packing up while it dried; and it was done.

“I want to do another picture, Ludwig,” Feliciano said, looking down at the lights of the town down the mountain behind them. “But it hurts to look at stuff from squinting.”

Gently, Ludwig pulled Feliciano’s head down into his lap.

“So don’t look,” he said quietly, and started to rub little circles around Feliciano’s eyes with his thumbs.

“Hmmmm… that’s nice, Ludwig. Thanks.”

A little later:

“Tell me about the stars?”

“There’s not many tonight,” Ludwig told him. “Not enough for constellations, with the clouds, but when the thinner parts pass over it makes patterns on the moon.”

“Can you see the North Star?”

Ludwig spent a long moment looking.

“A little.”

“ _Stella Maris_ , we used to call it,” Feliciano said sleepily, making a lazy circle with his finger, mimicking the seasonal rotations of the sky. “The Sea Star, because you could use it to navigate. I always-”

He yawned, interrupting himself.

“I always made it home with the North Star. I used to _hate_ coming out here, out inland, because it was so _hard_ to see the stars at night with the trees, and I was always scared I’d get stuck under a bunch of them and never ever find the sky again. And now…”

Feliciano was drifting off to sleep, Ludwig could tell; but he didn’t really want to try waking him up.

“Light pollution,” he murmured. “Can’t even see it on the lagoon.”

After he fell asleep, Ludwig slung the art case over his shoulder, picked Feliciano up, and took him home.


End file.
